Ray Marler and Ken Schrader recently completed the sale of their I-55 Federated Auto Parts Raceway Park in Pevely to Josh Carroll.
“It’s finally done,” Marler said about the negotiations. “We finished a few weeks ago.”
Carroll, 43, of Bethalto, Ill., said the sale closed on March 13.
In December, the Marler and Schrader families announced on social media that they had agreed to sell the raceway to Carroll. However, Marler stressed at that time that negotiations were not yet complete.
Marler, 86, said he has agreed to help Carroll run the raceway for the coming months.
He and his wife, Sue, have operated the raceway for about 30 years.
“We’ll continue to stay here and help him get settled,” Ray Marler said. “I’ll probably help him off and on all summer.”
He said he feels ready to retire and believes he is leaving the facility in good hands with Carroll, who has promoted auto racing at the Brownstown Bullring, a race track in Brownstown, Ill., he leases.
“My wife asked me, ‘What are you going to do?’ I said probably sit in my chair a little more.”
Carroll said he will continue to lease the Brownstown Bullring race track.
He said under his ownership of the Pevely raceway, fans can expect the same kind of auto sports entertainment the facility is known for.
“We’ll continue with the same racing events people have enjoyed and add some other big events,” Carroll said.
He said he has already overseen a number of facility improvements while the sale was being finalized.
“We’ve made a lot of repairs in the last couple of months,” Carroll said. “We put a new bar in. We redid the concession stand. We’ve poured some new concrete. The bar area is now all concrete. We put in new fencing at turns three and four. We renovated some of the old bathrooms that were closed for years. We redid all the suites. We reshaped the track.
“We’ve got plans to take it to the next level and have a nice family-friendly place.”
The facility has a capacity of 7,000.
Carroll said people may not notice the slight name change he made to the Pevely racing facility, changing it to I-55 Federated Auto Parts Raceway Park instead of Federated Auto Parts Raceway at I-55.
“We changed it just for legal reasons,” he said.